25 things you probably didn’t know about Christian
Christian is Michael McClure’s older brother and happens to be Tahl Gruer’s gay love interest on Season 2 of Showtime’s Polyamory: Married & Dating. Christian is in his early 50s, single and has dual citizenship, he has been living in Paris, France for over 10 years. He has a degree in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley and has worked at Dow Chemical, IBM and Citrix. Tahl first met Christian when the San Diego Polyamory Pod took a European vacation several years ago and it wasn’t until Christian came for a visit to San Diego that sparks started to fly.
- I live in Paris and can see the Eiffel Tower from my bed.
- I was born at the San Diego Zoo. (Actually at the big, pink Naval Hospital next door.)
- As a kid, I collected bird eggs and airline barf bags.
- I was a nerd: taped-together bottle-bottom glasses, high-water plaid pants, large calculator hanging on my belt,…
- My best friend from high school became a Baptist minister in Scandinavia and had 6 kids. At age 38 he decided he was gay, married a man, and recently ran for Swedish Parliament as a militant feminist.
- I have a degree in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley.
- I have CLL – most likely as a result of my work as a chemical engineer.
- I won the European Masters Diving Championships, and took fifth in the World Championships in platform diving.
- I swam the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, skied the 75km Finlandia hiihto, and completed the Alcatraz Challenge Triathlon three times (once placing 4th overall, partially on hands and knees)
- My favorite sport is bodysurfing; my mother taught me to bodysurf.
- I won the “Mr. White Butt” contest at a Parisian gay nudist bar.
- I made love in the Blue Grotto in Capri.
- I love to play with ants.
- I am fluent in 5 languages and proficient in several others (but still don’t consider myself a cunning linguist.)
- I am suspicious of deodorant.
- I love sloths.
- I lost about half of my friends to AIDS in San Francisco in the 1980s.
- I once fucked a guy with the tip of my cowboy boot.
- Unlike my brother, I have never vomited on my partner during sex.
- I like meat; wheat gluten creeps me out (“mock duck” could just as easily be formed into a “mock finger”)
- I have never dressed in drag, but would like to try it sometime.
- My first boyfriend had had sex with a melon. Once, while we were having sex, I shot onto the ceiling. At his going away party 10 years later he spent the evening pointing it out to the partners in his law firm.
- I used to have dreams where I could fly. I miss them.
- Every time I see a phoebe I think it is my dead grandmother and feel warm inside.
- Every time I see a fat, juicy house fly, something inside me says that it is a shame to let it go to waste.
- I am fascinated by alternative senses in animals – sonar, ability to orient themselves by the earth’s magnetic field, hibernation, pheremones, etc. – and wonder what additional senses we humans are capable of but have not recognized yet.
